


Nightmares

by Sarah1281



Series: 31 Days of Newmann [4]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 16:55:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24010189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarah1281/pseuds/Sarah1281
Summary: Hermann has comforted Newt through countless nightmares over the years and Newt is glad to be able to finally return the favor.
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Series: 31 Days of Newmann [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1726903
Comments: 4
Kudos: 32





	Nightmares

Newt jolted into wakefulness to the feeling that the life was being squeezed out of him. 

The cause of his predicament was clear. 

Hermann’s arms were wrapped tight around him. That was not in itself unusual. For a guy who had once had to just awkwardly shuffle closer to Newt until Newt got the picture and threw his arm around him, Hermann was very weirdly into hugging Newt. Half the time it was literally the same ‘I don’t know what a hug is but if there is an inch of space between us I might literally die’ bit he did after the elevator fight that one time when Newt felt like his head was going to explode or something. 

It was nice. Made him feel just how much Hermann loved him far more than a normal hug would have done. 

If Newt had asked someone who, of the two of them, they thought would have been told they could hug the other as long as they wanted and so literally clung like a limpet until the first person had made a great deal of progress on the puzzle they were doing and their leg was falling asleep and looked just so sad to have to let go…well he would have assumed that he was the hugger in that situation. But no, that honor belonged to Hermann about a week after Hermann had taken Newt home with him. 

The only other time Newt had been squeezed quite this tightly was the first time Hermann had been allowed to be in the same room as Newt without any glass or other protective measures between them. He had joked something about an assassination attempt and Hermann had Not Found That Funny At All Newton. 

He really should do something about his impending death, shouldn’t he? 

Even without his glasses and with the room mostly dark, Newt could see the sweat drenching Hermann’s hair and how his mouth was twisting unpleasantly. His eyes were squeezed shut and oh, wow, Newt didn’t know that Hermann could cling any tighter but apparently he could. 

Cause of death: Fiancé’s nightmares. What a way to go, huh? 

Knowing that Hermann would very much not appreciate waking up in bed with Newt’s corpse, Newt managed to move his hand to Hermann’s side, despite a great deal of force trying to keep him in place, and gently shook him. 

When that had no effect, Newt shook progressively harder and faster until eventually the vice-like grip loosened just enough that Newt could tell that Hermann had woken up. 

“What? Newton?” Hermann asked groggily. 

Newt felt a fond smile light up his face. “Hey, Hermann. How’s it going?” 

“How-how’s it going?” Hermann sounded a bit more awake. “Did you seriously wake me up at-” he paused and craned his neck to see the clock “-four in the morning just to ask me how it’s going?” 

“No, I woke you up to save a life,” Newt replied. 

“Newton.” 

“Fine, to be more specific I could tell you were having a nightmare and I didn’t like it,” Newt said. 

Hermann sighed. “That’s very sweet of you, darling, but you can’t just go around waking people up every time they have nightmares.” 

Newt laughed. “You hypocrite. You have never once left me in the grip of my own nightmares. And I have way more than you do!” 

“Well, yes, but…that’s different…” Hermann said unconvincingly. 

“Why, because you don’t want to have to watch me suffer but it’s fine for you to suffer?” Newt asked. 

“I could say no to that,” Hermann said. 

“You could but you shouldn’t bother because it’s pretty obvious that that’s what it is,” Newt said. “Hermann, you know I’m the same way. I think it’s fine for me to have those nightmares and just power through them but I’m never going to be okay watching you suffer.” 

Hermann smiled at that and finally took one arm off of Newt so that he could brush Newt’s hair off his face tenderly. “What does that say about us? We ought take better care of ourselves?” 

“Probably that we love each other more than we love ourselves,” Newt said. “Which is a bit worrying on the self-esteem front but we’ll work on it.” 

“Why were you awake to see my nightmare?” Hermann asked, his voice full of sudden concern. “You didn’t have one yourself, did you?” 

It made sense for Hermann to worry. Newt had never used to remember his dreams at all, not even during the war. He sort-of remembered a strange dream where Power Rangers were real and he was either fighting or being victimized by Rita Repulsa and there was something about becoming like a lunchable hamburger patty (but bigger. For once in his life bigger) and mind control and there were bats and maybe he was a bat? He didn’t super remember it but it was wild. 

He had had a dream where there was a guy with a microphone in his stomach or something that was acting all nice but he knew was out to get him. 

And the one where he was in the laundry room of his dad’s house and there was a big white truck turning into the driveway and he just KNEW the person driving the truck was going to kill him so he was frantically trying to shut the garage door. It was a lucid enough dream that he could force himself to wake up and was thankful for it. 

There were probably others but none that were really memorable. And all of them paled in comparison to what came next. 

He still didn’t know if some of those early dreams were even dreams or memories or psychic invasions by the precursors. But they were horrible. And Hermann had had them, too, to a lesser extent even if the only times they would ever talk about them was when they were snuggled up next to each other in front of the fire with a thick blanket covering them and mugs of hot chocolate in their hands to try and banish those particular demons. 

Some of the worst nightmares he didn’t even know if the precursors had influenced or not. They were dreams of succeeding. Dreams of the end of the world. Dreams of the end of Hermann. There was one dream, petty really compared to the others and what could have been, where Hermann figured it out and saved the day but he was just so disgusted with Newt he couldn’t even look at him and left him alone even when the precursors had gone as well. That dream had been far worse than the ones where no matter what happened the precursors stayed with him forever. Whether forever meant in their detention cell or a hospital or at the end of the world where he was the only human left as a reward for good service. 

The dreams after were different and almost embarrassing for their effect on him. Sure there were the dramatic ones with death and destruction and his hands around Hermann’s throat (he always had to throw up after those) but those he had expected. It was the dreams that were just…a day in the life of Dr. Geiszler, corporate shill. Dreams where he wasn’t even all that distressed because, no matter how bad the situation, it was simply impossible to be in full-panic mode all of the time. Dreams where he had actually had a good day, where he got up and didn’t feel hungover and went to work and Shao or Burke weren’t trying to make a fool of him and the subordinate he tried to talk to understood English and everything went entirely according to plan. The Precursor plan. And then he went home and drifted with Alice and was, in some incredibly fucked up way, happy. 

When he woke up and was confused that he wasn’t alone in the bed and the silence in his head felt wrong and he couldn’t process where all the yellow-green light was? When he caught himself starting to write Alice instead of Hermann when asked about his significant other? 

That was the true horror. All the glorious mundanity of it. 

When you weren’t sure when the nightmares were real and when reality was nightmares. 

“No, don’t worry,” Newt said reassuringly. “No dreams tonight. Not even cool ones. I don’t like dreams, you know. I think they’re a bad sign where you’re not sleeping deep enough and getting proper rest.” 

“I don’t think that’s right,” Hermann said doubtfully. 

“You can look it up in the morning if you absolutely must,” Newt said, kissing Hermann’s shoulder. 

“I’m sure I’ll have far better uses for my time,” Hermann said. 

He started petting Newt’s hair and Newt made an approving noise to encourage this very nice behavior. 

“What were you dreaming about anyway?” Newt asked, pressing his nose against Hermann’s chest and breathing in the smell of him. 

This was good. He liked this. 

“You were gone,” Hermann said simply. 

Newt’s heart clenched. “Oh, Hermann…”

“Not like…not like what it actually was. What I thought it was. You were happy at Shao. You managed to find a happy medium between your ideals and the power you needed to put them into practice. You were able to do a lot of good there. And I was at your wedding and you were marrying Alice only, of course, she wasn’t a kaiju brain. My brain filled in Molly Griggs for her, actually, and she was beautiful and she looked so happy and you looked so happy and you didn’t even look at me once. You were gone but it was alright. It was good, even, because you were happy even if I couldn’t be a part of that. I don’t even know why it was a nightmare.” 

It was Newt’s turn to wrap his arms around Hermann. “I do. I’m sorry. I…don’t know why, mind you, because that isn’t what happened and what did happen w-wasn’t really my fault but I’m sorry anyway.” 

“Is it very horrible of me, darling, to find that idea harder to bear than the hell you were actually in?” Hermann’s voice was so soft as to almost be inaudible. 

“No,” Newt said immediately. “No, of course not. It was a dream and who among us can control what we dream? And it’s what you thought for so many years and you were here all alone. Not-not completely alone, it seemed like you were really happy. But you wanted me and I wasn’t there.” 

“I needed you,” Hermann corrected. “But that’s not your problem.”

“What if I want it to be my problem?” Newt challenged. 

Hermann was smiling again. “I think I can accept that proposal. As long as you let yourself be my problem as well.” 

“Well if you insist,” Newt grumbled good-naturedly. 

“I was content. Happy, even, much of the time,” Hermann said distantly. “But it was better with you. Everything is always better with you.” 

“Hermann, you’re going to make me cry,” Newt threatened. 

“If I do then I’ll be here to wipe them away,” Hermann said, not sounding apologetic in the slightest. 

Newt just lay there, comfortably entangled with the man he loved, for quite some time. 

“I think it was harder for you because once you knew the truth you weren’t helpless. You were able to start saving me almost immediately. Saving all the things I couldn’t save. It was very Wicked of you, you know? ‘I’m limited. Just look at me. I’m limited. And just look at you you can do all I couldn’t do. Hermann. So now it’s up to you. For both of us. Now it’s up to you.’” 

Hermann shifted down so he could give Newt a soft kiss. “I love it when you sing to me.” 

“Well, good, I like singing to you,” Newt said, pleased. “When all that happened you didn’t really have time to feel it. You didn’t even have space to be mad at me. And don’t tell me I didn’t deserve it because that’s really besides the point. You just immediately had to go into world-saving mode and from there into Newt-saving mode. And you did it. You were great. But then you knew that I didn’t reject you. That even if I had really decided to take a job hundreds of miles from you and marry some amazing girl I never would have cut you out of my life. So in a strange way things would have better for _me_ if the lie was true but there wouldn’t have been any hope for us. And I don’t know about you but I rather like us.” 

“I must admit I’m fond of us as well,” Hermann said. 

“So let’s just bask in the fact that we’re here and we made it and there’s an ‘us’ at all and go back to sleep and I can enjoy the fact that I got to carry my weight in the nightmare comforting department for once,” Newt said soothingly. 

Hermann seemed to think that was an excellent plan. Still, as he settled back into a comforting sleep position (why he always wanted to have Newt’s head a few inches below him when they were lying on a bed and it could be any which way was really beyond him), he said, “You do a very nice job of comforting me, Newton. You always have even if you used to be much more…flail-y about it. But it’s not a competition.”

Newt snorted. Not a competition. “Yeah, whatever you say, Herms.” 

“Whatever I say,” Hermann repeated. “I could get used to that.” 

“You could,” Newt agreed. “I wouldn’t but you could.” 

Any other time that would have turned into some kind of a wonderful bickering match. Instead, Hermann kissed the top of his head and then stayed there, his breathing evening out slowly and gently blowing on Newt’s head. 

As Newt drifted off himself, he sent out a request to the universe not to plague Hermann with any more nightmares that night. 

But if it did (the universe being a known asshole and all) Newt had him covered.


End file.
